Thoughts on the MMO market; Why I loved UO

Things are interesting when it concerns the landscape of the MMO world. In the current MMO age, everything is set to a level of hand holding and made so ridiculously easy that any sense of gratification one might feel for having accomplished anything is nearly lost almost as instantly as it is accomplished because things were just too easy. On the other hand, the concept of a living, breathing world that players could interact in and be a part of has been neatly swept under the rug and replaced with essentially single player games trying to pass themselves off as MMOs. The world we live in, as far as the gaming world is even concerned, is not an MMO world. It’s just businesses trying to cash in on the actual MMO genre without understanding what truly got people so interested in it in the first place.

I’ve been sitting back and just thinking, mostly. And so far I realize that I miss the young nature of the MMO industry. I don’t mean WoW; that pretty much heralded in the current generation of single player games disguising themselves as MMOs. No, I mean the games that came before, like UO, Dark Age of Camelot and so forth, where the world was more determined by the player than the players waiting on the actual world to get updated in expansion packs.

For me, the best world was always UO. This was a world that was determined by the players, and events and such were only small hallmarks. I wasn’t required to be a fighter of any kind. I could just spend my days being a crafter, making things for other players, and I know the things I made would actually be desired. Crafting in today’s MMOs is such an afterthought, I am left wondering why they even bother having crafting anymore, because it’s little more than lip service in the end instead of actually being something that players can aspire to or want to desire in the long run of the game.

I guess it might be nostalgia talking at times, but it really is something I do desire; a return to what an MMO was truly supposed to be about. Something more than just creating a specific character class and going out and bashing monsters continuously over the head until they relented, that has just never really struck a chord with me. And even as much as I love protecting the team, that role itself has been becoming less and less needed as developers continually push their MMOs to be more single player than ever before.

No, my best time ever that I can honestly say I’ve ever had was sitting, as a blacksmith, at the Britain forge in UO just talking with other players, repairing their goods and even making armor. You didn’t feel useless because the stuff a crafter made was actually on par with the stuff that could be found. Very little was actually needed to actually improve upon that, though they could have done so without destroying the actual integrity of the game. I don’t even think I could possibly describe how much I would love to go back to UO right now and engage in that world again. But, unfortunately, that world is gone.

If I were to show people UO now, they would probably just imagine it as another Diablo dungeon romper, as the crafting professions themselves are pretty much dead. Though socializing and such still exists, and from I’ve seen, a strong commitment of the RP community, in the long run what UO is now and what UO was just are two different entities and what I would desire just won’t ever come back. Not without basically a complete and drastic reboot of the entire franchise, and doing that to a 15 year old game would pretty much just require a new game at this point.

So what is it about this game that I always end up pining for in my mind? What keeps making me pine for it in ways that no modern MMO has been able to fill the void in? I don’t think the answer is simple. Parts of it can be describes as nostalgia, parts of it may be described as mechanics, and maybe even parts of it can be described as the community itself. But I think what really attracts me, and I think a lot of people actually remember, is that you truly could decide your own fate and how you actually wanted to spend your time in the game.

Ultima Online wasn’t just another game, and while the learning curve for getting into it was steep (nowhere near as steep as other games mind you, but it definitely was not newb friendly) once you got into it, the possibilities of what you could do became wide as all can be. There was a lot to do in UO, from owning your own house to being a tailor to exploring dungeons. And none of these activities, believe it or not, required the player to take up one offensive weapon or spell in defense. If you were skilled enough or planned yourself well, you could play the game without worry of ever having to cross swords with another player or monster in your gaming life.

Of course, if you were to look back on history, the one thing that would probably be noted as infamous about UO was the fact that player killers were rampant in the game. The original premise for UO was that it was a social experiment. Believe it or not, the grand-daddy of the modern MMO movement wasn’t expected to last 6 months when it launched. But when it did, it pretty much exploded onto the world. And what was remarkable about this simple looking game was actually how complex it turned out to be. I know people think that the 250,000 player subs at UO’s peak means it was a failure of an MMO, but most people are also too young to remember or even know that until WoW came along, the largest MMO on the market only peaked 500,000 once and quickly declined.

This is why I am disappointed on the announcement of Elder Scrolls Online. When I heard the rumors, I actually thought, Maybe they might make a sandbox game like classic UO, and of course I set myself up for disappointment. But I was using my knowledge I had from the fact of how the previous Elder Scrolls games had been created. But, instead, they flat out stated it’s going to be yet another theme park MMO, a single player game disguised as a multi-player game with classes locked in and such. So, players will not have choices and such. Now, one of the things they cite is the difficulty of balance in a freeform system, and I don’t disagree that can be hard, but that is just dumb to ignore the one core facet of your entire legacy, not to mention why can’t I be a bloody werewolf? Again something that was core since Morrowind.

I just don’t understand developers who want to jump into the MMO market, with their famous products, but not stick to the core fundamentals of the product that made it great. Elder Scrolls would have been perfect to usher the MMO back into the living, breathing world set up that MMOs use to espouse to. Giving players the ability to be whatever they wanted, play how they wanted, without forcing them into a set class. Let them be the blacksmith and forge weapons. But instead, we are given yet another theme park loot hunt game that will probably have yet another tacked on crafting system that means jack shit in the end, except for maybe the one that is all important (probably the potion maker) if they even bother with crafting at all.

In short, I believe Bethesda is making a big mistake. They are shunning the fans of their game to appease the lowest common denominator. They are looking at WoW and going, let’s be like them because they think copying them but changing the wallpaper is just going to be enough. It really isn’t. This was the perfect opportunity to take MMOs back to their roots at what they were all about, to allow people to actually be a part of a living, breathing world, and allow them to play it how they wanted to without always being forced to play some form of damage dealing character and always having to hunt and kill monsters, or other players.

So, what would I have done differently? Well, I would have incorporated a skill system. No levels. I would have looked at classic UO as the basis for the design. I would have then decided how I would have wanted it to pan out, how crafting should work, and built the world around the idea that crafters are important to the game. I would have let the player decide how they want to play, if they want to mine, or be a blacksmith and hang out and repair gear for the adventurer players, let them. Allow them to enjoy the game as they see fit.

How I would have handled crafting would have been done thusly; the skill of a crafter determines the quality of the items, with a highly skilled crafter making the nearly best items. I would have incorporated a type of enchantment system that would allow for prefixes and suffixes that give special boosts to items as well. Items found in the world could potentially be slightly better than what a crafter could make, but it would be very rare. A gatherer would be just as important as someone who goes out and slays the rampaging dragons that swoop down on the world. This would help to create an in game economy and such that would actually help promote trade and commerce and yes, items would have durability maybe even requiring replacement in the end.

Speaking of items, I would finally get rid of the stupid bind system. It was novel, but now it’s just a ridiculous control system that has done nothing but hurt community and promotes elitism in the worst ways. Elitism is not a bad thing, but the type of elitism that spawns around it is. Item loss from death is a bad thing to deal with, but I think some items lost from death should occur, but other things like weapons and armor can probably stay.

Death would be something that would need to be handled carefully, but I don’t think the game should be easy, and I do think that a death penalty of some kind is a necessary evil in an MMO. Otherwise you just end up with the death zerg. A loss a consumables on death, and possibly gold should be a good start with ways to get them back. Primary items like weapons and armor I would consider as well, since in order for an economy to thrive there needs to always be a constant demand for things. I know people would hate that, but economies don’t really thrive when there is no reason to repair, replace, or sell items.

I also probably would have pissed off a lot of people that enjoy their ranged classes by bringing ammo back and of course, with mages, having reagents again of some kind, just like in UO, for their spells. I know that’s probably not very Elder Scrolls, but it would have helped balance things out in the long run where the warrior types would have to constantly run in melee while the ranged can just plink away at range.

Another thing I would have brought back is limited pack space not based on arbitrary slots assigned by a bag type, but by actual carrying capacity. The weight in your pack and how much can be carried would, in the end, determine exactly how much you can carry. This limit could be determined by strength, of course, but wouldn’t restrict players based on a slot system but more on just how much they can actually physically carry.

And then there is the one thing that often gets brought up in every MMO but either not implemented or very poorly done in the modern MMO because there really isn’t a point to it, and that is housing. Housing was perhaps one of those features of UO that basically added icing to the cake of the fact that UO was a living, breathing world that people were a part of. You could own a slice of the land and decorate a house. You could have vendors to sell your goods for you while you were in town, and there were actual player towns that sprung up like this. Space was limited, but players could buy or sell houses as well, and later, were able to build the plot as they saw fit. If you want a theme to build an inn, you were capable of doing that. This is something I would do, but probably use a plot system similar to horizons, but not as convoluted or restricting as that. That way the players can build how they want.

And of course, the final part of the puzzle would be PvP. PvP is important in a living, breathing world of MMOs. But there would have to be some differences from the willy nilly gank style of old UO to today. Safe areas, maybe kings territories, and of course probably special rules for PvP. After all, today’s PvPers who’ve grown up in the safe world of WoW (yes, I am calling WoW PvPers carebears) would probably froth at the idea that their uber leet sword of pwn just got ganked from their corpse, but then again, I say the one thing about UO’s PvP is that it acted as its own kind of stat loss as a player went to regear. It was probably the biggest factor in helping control the battlefield and keeping people from zerg rushing. It was probably one of the biggest make people think things, the fact that dying could result in them losing all their stuff. But again, it’s something that most MMO gamers just wouldn’t accept.

In the end, I don’t expect much out of ESO, especially since they made it clear they are just going to copy the tried and true WoW formula. I can hope they will wake up in the end and realize that giving a finger to their fans is a bad idea, but who knows. I would hope they might actually experiment and try to make the MMO a true sandbox world instead of yet another bloody theme park that we have entirely too much of on the market. I think that’s what a lot of the angry posts are truly about in the long run. Who knows, I am still waiting and seeing, I guess.

If I could wave a magic wand, I would probably make a classic UO reboot with modern 3d graphics but keeping its classic gameplay albeit streamlined and the isometric viewpoint. Hell, if I could magically get it, I would use Blizzard’s graphics engine because that’s just about perfect for UO, make the entire world of Britannia, maybe double the size of the world and just go from there. But that’s a pipe dream, and currently while most developers think that more theme park games are magic dollar signs, my dream of seeing another game like UO just keeps becoming smaller and smaller.

But I keep holding onto hope. Maybe soon a developer will wake up.

Champions: On Alert!; Surprising Update

One thing I can say is that I have been pleasantly surprised with the turnaround in Champions Online. Now, this is not to say that everything is going smoothly or perfectly but the direction and the way they are working their designs has been pretty good. They’ve started implementing methods and such for Champions that has over all improved the game, honestly, and looks to be leading towards giving some good overall. It isn't all peaches and cream, but I am going to just discuss what has impressed me.

Now, I know there are people that believe the mod system is a bunch of hooey or some other thing like that, but just taking the new item and gear system into account, the overall improvement just on mid-range mods alone, is a staggering improvement over what we use to have. The vocal minority complaints have basically been coming from those people that can’t farm one critter over and over for the best of the best gear. In short, Cryptic has now given a foundation to keep playing instead of the former log in when the new content releases, complete it then log out for the next several months model that has currently been in the game as it stands. IE, they gave people reasons to play now, and for some odd reason, those vocal people find that a horrible idea. *boggle*

Old systems were removed because, frankly, they weren’t going anywhere. I know some people like to claim that the old crafting system was the “best of the bestest” out there, but really, it was crap. Having a useless system that was worthless from the minute you started messing with it, and even the interesting items only the crafter could actually use was a ridiculous idea to begin with. In short, they removed the mess of useless stacking components and just gave us ways to get the special stuff from vendors. And now can just combine items for the stats we want, and put them in the gear we desire. No more of the random stats that do very little for the character.

The Alerts themselves are actually pretty good, with a few quibbles. Over all though, they provide content and if you are hunting for some costume pieces you always wanted, the bosses can drop particular pieces that can be used or sold by you. In addition to that, each of the types can either help you level, give out a large amount of resources (money in the game) or even provide you with modifications. Then there are the special types which are generally week long variants of the other three but with a special villain or villain group to combat. It’s a good foundation start and I can see Alerts being used to introduce special event content that has more of the super hero flavor to it, such as moving the Undead Hero fights during the Blood Moon to Alerts instead of having them out in the world.

The biggest thing that I am actually interested in that was just announced as a contest that can be found here is create your own villain, which the Grand Prize is your villain will be featured in an EPIC 10 man encounter (ie raids). The game system already is set up to support raids now, you can see it through the team up window, and this actually makes me happy to see that large scale content like this is finally being considered for Champions. It has been needed to help with endgame and the new foundation for loot and such that was created gives the devs a large amount of leeway in creating unique items and upgrades for characters as Champions now pushes forward.

The follow up now is to wait and see when the lair review goes through, which is also supposed to include epic lairs (which are supposed to be very tough 5 man content, IE heroic dungeons basically). The dungeon finder is already in place, as it can be seen in the Instance Queues window with its own tab, but the dungeons themselves have not been hooked in. And after that, there is supposed to be new content with a level cap raise and talk of new zones. I can only hope that this will include increased support for new power sets as well for the game as well as reviewing what’s already out there.

The future is looking bright, and if in gam activity is any proof, this was just the type of thing that Champions needed to get the ball rolling again. Hopefully we will see more in the future.

Edit: Something else I forgot, the number of costume pieces that people have always wanted were also released with this update that you can find as random drops from the NPCs in the world or using new in game type currencies (similar to TOR) you can buy them from special vendors instead. It's a great way to flesh out characters now.

Being Casual is no Excuse for Being Incompetent

You know, it’s a growing thing I’ve been seeing lately. I have nothing against casual players. In fact I actively encourage people to play at their own time and put life before a game, in so much that I think the guilds I form in games have the most lax rules concerning actual attendance and so forth. However, there is an ever growing group of people that trumpet this casual banner and use it as an excuse to be utterly stupid or incompetent. These people aren’t exactly what I call casuals, so much as people using the casual banner to try and explain away their own ineptness or incompetence and try to make believe that the things they hate (that tend to expose their incompetence) is what other casual players hate. This is where I’ve come up with my latest saying of being casual is no excuse to be incompetent.

Really, I would rather say stupid, but I am being somewhat nice about it. But there is a lot of people lately that are using the casual banner as an excuse to be absolutely incompetent players, and they try to disguise this excuse behind things of such as “I don’t have time to learn everything about a game” or “It’s unfair I have to spend so much time doing these things” or “It’s my time and money, I can play however I like.” So we will examine some of these excuses.

Now, one of the biggest trumpets I’ve seen from these type of people that hide under the casual banner are the ones that play MMOs and multiplayer geared games and don’t like to interact with people or team. This is absolutely stupid. No, you can’t argue it. These are MMOs. They are designed to bring you to interact with other people. There are plethoras of single player games that do the exact thing you are looking for. If you ride the excuse that you hate interacting with other people in a mass media experience, then really, MMOs are not for you and you are already demonstrating the key malfunction of your argument.

But then people trumpet my money and time is my own, and thus you can’t tell me how to spend it. This is true, but then, so is the money and time of the people you are joining with and showing your utter incompetence towards. I don’t give two shits how you spend your time and screw up your character in the game. But when you join a team and start ruining everyone else’s time, no you are not helping. You are demonstrating that you are incompetent and you don’t deserve to do the content that those people are working towards. You are the reason people sit there and tell you to learn2play. It isn’t there fault you refuse to work as a team player. If you are so inconsiderate of other people’s time and energy they are devoting to what they enjoy, then why should they consider yours? Don’t complain when you refuse to be a team player in a team based activity and people don’t respect you when you are not respecting them. And don’t complain that you can’t get the new hotness because you refuse to be a team player.

Another common excuse is that they say they don’t have time to learn these things. This is so many ways of retarded and stupid I don’t know where to begin. Basic common sense doesn’t require time and much effort to apply. Secondly, it doesn’t take much to learn that 2 and 2 equals 4. Developers have made the games they create so easy to understand these days that it can feel insulting on many levels because they are catering to people that shouldn’t be catered to. If you can’t take the 2 minutes to look at read the description and understand the basics of your characters abilities and class and so forth, then no, it isn’t lack of time, it’s you’re being lazy. If you want to be in game activities that require teaming and being a team player, then take the time to learn your character, role and abilities.

Another common excuse is, I don’t want to play this way. Then why the hell did you play the class to begin with? There are classes obviously better suited to the role you wanted. Don’t sit there and try to pin excuses of game mechanics or flavor or any other non-sense on your ineptness to actually picking the class and role you wanted. This goes doubly so when you go in saying you will do something but aren’t. You are really wasting people’s times doing that.

Some people of course try to say that it's unfair they can't get the best stuff without needing a group. These are lazy people. In short they want everything handed to them instead of actually just going out and playing the game or learning to be a team player. Honestly, these are the type of people that MMOs just aren't for, and for whatever reason they keep playing them. It baffles me.

But really, there are a ton of excuses these days that people try to hide behind for their reason being incompetent. Some don’t even want to communicate; they stand there like a timid little mouse and act like everyone else is supposed to magically do things for them. And people that try to use the term casual to hide their own incompetence really irks me, because it insults the actual casual players that enjoy playing, and I know are damn good at playing when they can play. I don’t ever accept people telling me that just because they are casual means they are a bad player. No, you are a bad player because you refuse to actually improve yourself, so stop trying to hide behind being a casual and insulting people for it.

So in the end, I will say it this way. Being casual is no excuse for being incompetent or stupid. There are many people out there that are casual that are truly good despite limited time to play. So don’t even try to lump yourself in that group of casual. Most casuals actually take time to learn, but the few who don’t tend to give the casual group a bad name.

First Impressions of Champions PTS Overhaul

So, here we are the first major, major update to the PTS, the Alerts have gone out and with it some of their first changes to the game including a little bit of re-itemization. And all I can say is, eh…. They’ve been aping and hyping all this now for quite some time and the first experience with it has been exceptionally underwhelming. And I don’t mean from the unfinished, buggy reasons why. They are extremely underwhelming, the whole idea of them being “team” content got flushed out of the door when the team I was in pretty much ran over each group solo.

It just baffles me every which way that the same group that is making Star Trek Online, that not only has viable endgame content, can’t seem to tell their Champions group to get their act together. A statement from one of the devs said they were looking at it from an endgame perspective, to which I will add; No, you bloody well were not. Hell several of the groups I was testing with the exact same utterance of the lack of challenge pretty much was very clear.

And yet again, I can do nothing but facepalm as they’ve not only, once again focused on low level characters, they are, again for the third or fourth time now, redoing the starting level content of the game. The 1 to 15 level-range has received so many revamps and revisions now that a lot of the content is out of order. This is not smart design here. I can’t even begin to fathom what they are thinking. They are designing this game as if the levels did not exist and think that everyone can meet the exact same challenges on equal terms, but the team game is an appalling mess, the content is laughable, and they pretty much give things away to make any actual replay value pretty low.

Now while they say this is just foundation work so they can move forward, in the past 3 years now, there has been absolutely no forward momentum performed with Champions Online. In fact, the only thing to have received any significant updates has always been the level 1 to 15 range of the game. Anything for teaming or challenging content has not been added and has pretty much just been ignored.

So in short, what I am saying, this update is very thin and needs more to it. If this is all that’s planned, then there is already a huge problem. This level of mismanagement has always annoyed me, because it’s something that you have to go out of your way to mess up. Champions’ deserves better than this and it is appalling on so many levels how the game is being treated.

All I can say, if what’s on test is any indication of the potential future to be had, it’s extremely too little and honestly, I think it’s well past too late. But I guess I can check back each week to see if anything else has changed, but I honestly don’t feel it will. Cryptic seems content in appealing to the minority demographic that remains instead of actually building a game meant for the MMO world.

On Cheating in MMOs

PvP is a pretty straight forward affair. People that have been at it for a long time and experienced know the difference between good PvP and bad PvP. While opinions may vary, it can be easily placed that a game that doesn’t allow for PvP to be one or two shot game fests but doesn’t turn into forever lasting slugfests tend to be the most fun, which also end up utilizing more skills and abilities on the part of the player. However, this is also something to be weighed in on the MMO market to, where a game that only has a few useful builds or powers in PvP, then one can argue the game utterly failed at balance.

However, there is a darker side to PvP, one that is generally occupied by the less skilled who would rather do anything they can to win instead of actually doing the basic, most fundamental thing of gameplay; learning to actually play. These are the people that generally argue in favor of easy kill almost unavoidable mechanics or play whatever the cheapest load out combo is for near insta-gibbing of anyone regardless of build or spec. These are often the people you see using the words Learn2play as their battle cry most of all on the forums in defense of an obviously overpowered spec or ability.

Unfortunately, it’s also this crowd that tends to also produce the highest level of the worst type of players to encounter in a game experience like this; commonly called a hacker, but universally known as a cheater. Generally this is a catch all term for someone who will abuse bugs, exploits or third party programs to gain whatever unfair advantage they can in an environment. Their only goal is to win and they could care less about the actual rules or skill required or the actual challenge involved. They only care about the win in the end, not about actually proving they can play well.

Now the first thing I want to make clear. Not everyone that is better than you is a cheater. Some people just either know how to use their skills well, know how to place themselves better, or just many other factors. Even luck can boil down to who wins or doesn’t. So in the end if you get outplayed, then it might just be that, you got outplayed. If you are new, it might be confusing at first if you don’t understand how the various classes work or something, but in the end, you have to come to understand, there is always going to be someone better than you in the end. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who beats you isn’t doing it legitimately.

Now there are certain things one could universally say are bugs and exploits of broken mechanics, and the amount of action that will be taken in those cases is relative to the amount of dollars that a company will lose. In the Pay to Play environment (P2P) this, unfortunately, often leads to the game rarely taking action against these obvious game shattering exploits. This tends to also cause more harm than good, realistically, as instead of making examples and proving they are taking a stand, they allow these people to continue abusing said bugs and exploits and state common excuses like, “It was our fault, and we should not punish people for doing something.”  While I am certain in some instances this is true, such as if an entire class’s commonly used ability is the cause, this is not the case when an obscure ability or combo of abilities produces an obviously broken effect and only a small handful of people abuse it. And instead of actually immediately fixing the issue they let it linger. This produces the effect of no confidence in the developers and tends to hurt their longevity when it concerns the PvP arena, especially when no action is taken in the concern of this.

Exploiting a bug can be many forms, and almost all the time results in gaining an advantage that would otherwise never be had. For instance, abusing the stuck mechanics to avoid an otherwise lethal situation, especially in the realm of PvP or using a specific bug to allow a character to produce ludicrously high damage that even the most robust tank can’t withstand. Many try to claim that it’s just using the system to their advantage and sadly in many circumstances, instead of actually punishing the people abusing these exploits. Most game companies decide to weigh towards the dollar value and let it slide thus continuing to send a message that they allow this to happen instead of making an example of those people and maybe even curtailing some of the more fearful exploiters, and thus losing potential dollars and those who prefer a fair and even environment without having to rely on bugs and exploits for a level playing field don’t want to belong to. Hysterically, most of the people that abuse the bug will do whatever they can to defend it.

Now, the final type of cheater is the hacker type. They use third party programs, most of the time illegal, but sometimes legal, to actually gain an advantage that could not normally be had in the game. Anything from super bursts of speed, to inhuman levels of target, to even magically knowing where everything is in a game that no one without spending hours doing the timing themselves and setting up a clock could know. People abusing these types of programs sometimes are doing it to see how long they get caught. However, there are groups of people who go out of their way to find these cheats and the first question almost always asked is, “Is it detectable?”

Blatant hacking is almost easy to see. People moving faster than it would be physically possible or healing impossibly fast or magically hitting you regardless of location are all examples of hacks that you could see. Hacks come in many forms and vary from game type to game type, but they all basically aim at one thing; to give a ludicrous advantage to make winning easier if not guaranteed. Hacks aren’t limited to just those, either, there are hacks designed to run and do errands for people and these are also universally riled.

At the end of the day, the reality is that cheaters are everywhere. They know they are doing it, and many try to cover up that fact. Some blatantly abuse bugs and exploits or third party programs and hover on excuses that they use them to make the devs fix them faster. However, I think it would be in developer’s best interest to start banning people more openly. If you don’t show the cheaters that your policy is actually something you back up they will basically just wipe their ass with whatever your terms state, and in the long run this will cost you more dollars in the end. Stop dancing around these problems and actually start doing something and backing up your claims of no tolerance. While I know that every claim of cheating or hacking needs to be investigated, if you were actually making examples of them you might have less than would actually appear.